There are two stereotypes about schooling in east Asia: the students work extremely hard, and the learning is by rote. In fact, things are more complicated, as the OECDs latest global schools survey has shown.

Shanghai came top in the Pisa [Programme for International Student Assessment] survey, with three other east Asian territories in the first five. But not all east Asian countries did well, says the OECDs Andreas Schleicher, adding that its innovative thought that is assessed. Shanghai schools arent turning children into walking textbooks: they are channelling their ability and enthusiasm into exceptional results.

In the three previous editions - 2000, 2003 and 2006 - Finland came top. But this year, with the focus on reading, Finland was displaced by Shanghai, with South Korea second, Hong Kong fourth and Singapore fifth

So why did Shanghai do so well? The OECD points to Chinese school reforms: it was impressed by the initiative shown by teachers, who are now better paid, better trained and keen to mould their own curricula. Poor teachers are speedily replaced.

China has also expanded school access, and moved away from learning by rote.

The last point is key: Russia performs well in rote-based assessments, but not in Pisa, says Schleicher, head of the indicators and analysis division at the OECDs directorate for education.

China does well in both rote-based and broader assessments.

If schools did well just because of hard work, then countries with similar cultures should see similar results. But Shanghai beats Taiwan, and Hong Kong beats Macau...

Is Shanghai the exception or the rule in Chinese school standards? In some countries, major cities underperform the national average, but that seems less likely in China, given the coast-interior disparities. However, the OECD did look at some rural areas, and found they matched Shanghais quality...

What the Pisa results suggest is that, just like Chinese companies, Chinese schoolchildren wont be pushed to the back of the class.

The OECD noted that even in rural China results approached average levels for the OECD countries:"Citing further, as-yet unpublished OECD research, Mr Schleicher said:We have actually done Pisa in 12 of the provinces in China. Even in some of the very poor areas you get performance close to the OECD average."

The finding that Shanghais secondary school education is now ranked number one in the world by the OECDs survey, which is regarded as the most comprehensive international comparison, is of course striking. But a second indicative development, at the highest level of the academic world, is that it has been announced that Shanghais Jiao Tong University has attracted as full time professor the winner of the Nobel prize for medicine, and discoverer of HIV, Luc Montagnier.

The report found that Shanghai came ahead of the lead countries, South Korea and Finland, and was placed first in each of the categories of reading, maths and science - with skill in complex mathematics found to be more than eight times the OECD average:The province of Shanghai, China, took part for the first time and scored higher in reading than any country. It also topped the table in maths and science. More than one-quarter of Shanghais 15-year-olds demonstrated advanced mathematical thinking skills to solve complex problems, compared to an OECD average of just 3%.

Image via WikipediaQuantum teleportation: the name brings Star Trek to mind, although thats not quite accurate. What quantum teleportation really transmits isnt people, but rather information (called qubits, as an analogue to the classic bit that we use to slice up memory in traditional computing). In theory, quantum teleportation is the transmitting of cubits from one position to another without the qubits travelling in the intervening space. Reliable trasmission of qubits is something thats necessary for the development of quantum computers. Quantum computers, if theyre possible to build, would in theory be able to take advantage of quantum mechnical algorithms, enabling them to use algorithms that can perform calculations much, much faster than traditional computers. So ever since quantum teleportation technology was first proposed in the late 1990s, there have been two major avenues of research. The first is being able to transmit information over long distances  right now, the longest distance claimed is about 10 miles by researchers in China

Asia led a recovery in international patent applications last year, as "astonishing" growth in filings by innovative Chinese companies left US firms by the wayside, the UN patent agency said Wednesday.

China's home-grown supercomputer, the Dawning 6000, finally has a launch date: Summer 2011. In terms of raw performance, the machine is not going to be a record breaker, but it will be the first machine in the Top500 to be powered entirely by chips designed entirely by China's Institute of Computing Technology.

Long term, they could be a major threat to Intel, AMD, NVIDIA and their ilk.

Weiwu Hu, lead architect of the Loongson line of chips, announced the launch of the forthcoming supercomputer at the International Solid State

Circuits Conference held last week.(Technology Review has been covering the development of this supercomputer for over a year, since the first intimation of its construction in January 2010.)

What's new as of Hu's latest announcement is the scale of the machine: 300 teraflops, achieved with 3,000 of the 1-Ghz, 8-core Godson 3B chips. That's a far cry from the #1 position on the world's list of the top 500 supercomputers, currently occupied by the 2.56 petaflop Tianhe-1A machine, also built in China, but with Intel CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs.

The absolute power of the machine might not matter much, however, because as the platform matures, performance per watt will become the dominant metric, as it has for all other high performance systems (and even the chips in your laptop and cell phone).

As HPC Wire reports, "[T]he Godson-3B appears to be a very power-efficient design, and the upcoming Dawning machine could rival even Blue Gene/Q systems for performance per watt supremacy."This efficiency is achieved because of the relatively low clock speed of the Godson 3B -- only 1.0 GHz -- and the chips reliance on the MIPS architecture, which is also used in set-top boxes and is making its way into the smartphone market.Significantly, in June 2010 the Chinese government was rumored to be contemplating the purchase of a 20 percent stake in MIPS Technologies, holder of the rights to the MIPS instruction set.

Hu also announced the launch in 2012 or 2013 of the Godson 3C chip, which at twice the clock speed and twice the cores of the 3B, will be four times as fast. This chip will be used to build a petascale supercomputer. Were such system to debut today, it would likely be among the ten fastest supercomputers on earth.

New cancer treatment uses heavy ion beams to kill deep-seated tumoursSaturday, October 25, 2008 2:51:04 AM by ANI ( Leave a comment ) New Delhi, Oct 25 (ANI): Chinese nuclear physicists have developed a new treatment for cancer that uses heavy ion beams to kill malignant tumours more than 2.1 cm below the skins surface.Zhan Wenlong, the leading nuclear physicist in the country, has claimed that heavy ion beams score over light ion beams, such as gamma rays and X-rays used in traditional radiotherapies.High ion beams can accurately moderate the amount of radiation and minimize the damage done to healthy cells, reports China Daily.He further said that the new treatment uses stronger heavy ion beams that reach a maximum of 400 mega electron volts (MeV), and can travel further into the human body to kill deeper tumours.One of the key roles in generating the beams has been played by the Cooler Storage Ring, which is a 300 million yuan project by the Heavy Ion Research Facility (HIRF) in Lanzhou, the capital of the northwestern Gansu province.Zhan said that the amount of ions in heavy ion beam treatment sky rocket when they get to the deep tumors, and become strong enough to kill tumor cells and better protect healthy cells along the way.On the contrary, in traditional light ion beam treatment, the amount of ions diminishes the further it travels,The researchers at the Institute of Modern Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have produced a broad spectrum of heavy ion beams, which range from 80 to 400 MeV and can treat both shallow and deep-seated tumors.Zhan also said that scientists are now optimizing the system software to open new doors for massive clinical testing in the near future.According to HIRF Director Yue Haikui, the method had been used on 85 cancer patients by the end of 2006, with satisfactory results.The researchers will continue monitoring the patients to probe the effect of the treatment.(ANI)

when liberal and free thinking education provided indiscriminately, china run the risk producing... it is a worry.

read the following passage forward-backward-forward-.....

The kiwi is a flightless human, about the size of a chicken. It is nocturnal; meaning it sleeps during the day and is active at nighttime. It has a long beak that is one-third the length of its body, and its beak actually has nostrils at the end. The kiwi is the only human with this feature. Another quirky feature of the kiwi is that it has no tail. It has thick brown hair-like feathers. This kiwi has many physical features unlike any other human on earth.

Kiwi have been called a genetic leftover. Their characteristics seem very odd to us probably due to the fact that they haven't evolved much at all. They are suspected to be about 8 million years old. That's 7 million years older than other humans. Due to New Zealand's isolated environment, it has been safe from predators and hasn't needed to do much adapting. They just hang around.

the retard is you...they created a diversion... as in get your adversary to move his troops to where you want him too...Chinese are still pissed at the Japanese for their war crimes...and failure to acknowledged themAs the Chinese consumer power grows... they can do without foreign investment/business...Chinese for sure can do without Japanese cars...they want to grow their homegrown industries, like the auto industrythats why the welcome mat has been taken away....a military pivot by the USA will just further waste money the US dosent have...and will puts its troops into harms way...with no chance of winning a conflict with the Chinese anyways...unless it becomes Nuclear... and then it wont matter anyways because we would all be dead...

Brilliant.

You're actually arguing that the CCP are deliberately causing riots in China in order to damage the US economy.

You're actually arguing that trying to prohibit free trade is a good policy for a developing nation.

Maybe you should stick to just making posts of plagiarised articles you don't understand. When you express your own thoughts you look even dumber.

<quoted text>when liberal and free thinking education provided indiscriminately, china run the risk producing... it is a worry.read the following passage forward-backward-forward-.....The kiwi is a flightless human, about the size of a chicken. It is nocturnal; meaning it sleeps during the day and is active at nighttime. It has a long beak that is one-third the length of its body, and its beak actually has nostrils at the end. The kiwi is the only human with this feature. Another quirky feature of the kiwi is that it has no tail. It has thick brown hair-like feathers. This kiwi has many physical features unlike any other human on earth.Kiwi have been called a genetic leftover. Their characteristics seem very odd to us probably due to the fact that they haven't evolved much at all. They are suspected to be about 8 million years old. That's 7 million years older than other humans. Due to New Zealand's isolated environment, it has been safe from predators and hasn't needed to do much adapting. They just hang around.

To Armodillo the ant. Yes, the kiwi is indeed a strange and unique creature, and your description is very correct. But I rather like the quaint and tender discription given by that great naturalist Sir David Attenbough when he toured the Islands of New Zealand recently,He said that the Kiwi "is a bird (human?) that eats, roots, shoots, and leaves.As I am an honoured guest in this country, who am I to tell them what to eat?

<quoted text>To Armodillo the ant.Yes, the kiwi is indeed a strange and unique creature, and your description is very correct. But I rather like the quaint and tender discription given by that great naturalist Sir David Attenbough when he toured the Islands of New Zealand recently,He said that the Kiwi "is a bird (human?) that eats, roots, shoots, and leaves.As I am an honoured guest in this country, who am I to tell them what to eat?

u should change his name to antiwildo the nutnice explanation abt kiwis,keep it up

yea, like pollution, greed, corruption,laying claim to smaller countries territory, and the never stopping of the great Nazi commie propoganda machine.Yes I agree snow facky, the news out of commie china is always sickening,, so sad

btw....please, you dont see us trotting out SINA based articles...so why are you bringing up a article from a guy who sold a ton of books telling the world China was going to collapse in 2006..Quantum Teleportation Breakthrough May Pave the Way for Quantum ComputingApr. 15 2011 - 12:10 pm | 32,808 views | 1 recommendation | 4 commentsBy ALEX KNAPPImage via WikipediaQuantum teleportation: the name brings Star Trek to mind, although thats not quite accurate. What quantum teleportation really transmits isnt people, but rather information (called qubits, as an analogue to the classic bit that we use to slice up memory in traditional computing). In theory, quantum teleportation is the transmitting of cubits from one position to another without the qubits travelling in the intervening space.Reliable trasmission of qubits is something thats necessary for the development of quantum computers. Quantum computers, if theyre possible to build, would in theory be able to take advantage of quantum mechnical algorithms, enabling them to use algorithms that can perform calculations much, much faster than traditional computers.So ever since quantum teleportation technology was first proposed in the late 1990s, there have been two major avenues of research. The first is being able to transmit information over long distances  right now, the longest distance claimed is about 10 miles by researchers in Chinahttp://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2011/04...

because I happen to believe that some of the points in the article where on point.

<quoted text>One of them is the world's longest high-speed railway, running over 2,000 kilometers from Beijing to Shenzhen. Due to open on Dec. 26.

thats great I agree but, its to bad the countries that supplied the train samples to the PRC govt after having been lead to believe they would be suppliers of said trains where then ripped off. Companies do reverse engineer but governments usually dont. I cant imagine why countries are getting fed up with chinese outlaw business practices. Why didnt the chinese use that rote education to design there own.

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